National Museum of African American History & Culture

This extraordinary collection encompasses the dark and the light of our nation's racial history, from the shackles, shacks, and whips of slavery to an exuberant lemon-yellow costume worn onstage by Bootsy Collins when playing bass for the funk band Parliament. The story begins several floors below ground-level with information about the early days of the African slave trade. Visitors follow the exhibits through the subsequent floors, climbing ramps as the story progresses through the colonies, the Constitution, the Civil War, Jim Crow and carpetbaggers, the civil rights movement, and up to the present. The exhibits on the upper floors, covering arts and sports and cuisine and community, are a joyous celebration of ongoing history and culture. The crowds who sign up for entry tickets months in advance, and who stand in front of displays and share their stories with complete strangers, are testimony that it's high time this history was honored with its own museum.